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Measures designed to ease the UK Government's new planning rules by giving local councils time to adjust to higher housing targets could delay their impact by years, experts have warned.
A “comprehensive overhaul” of England’s planning system, which will be published on Thursday, will increase pressure on councils to use “local plans” for development that set out where homes should be built, in order to speed up future decision-making.
But plans that reflect the new targets could take years to implement, even as Labor races to reverse the decline in housebuilding and increase construction across the country to the highest level in decades.
“The plan-led system that Labor is clearly still completely behind still has a lot of backlog,” said Ben Simpson, director of planning at consultancy Litchfields. “They could have gone further.”
The transitional arrangements mean that the higher housing targets will not immediately apply to local councils that already have a plan in place based on existing lower housing targets, or that are close to completing one.
Graham Prothero, chief executive of housebuilder MG Gleeson, praised the government's rapid action on planning, but said these reforms “will start to benefit (housing) numbers in three, four, five, six or seven years.”
The new policy, to be set by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, sets tougher housing targets for local authorities totaling 370,000 new homes each year, and requires councils to build on so-called gray belt sites within the green belt to meet those targets.
But experts worry that the move to the new policy will create opportunities for anti-development authorities to delay adoption of the new targets for years.
In its submission to the official planning consultation, the UK Property Industry Association urged the government to accelerate the transition or risk “undermining their wider ambition to reach 1.5 million homes over the course of this Parliament because some plans across the country simply will not do so”. “Be ambitious enough with housing numbers.”
The National Housing Federation, which represents affordable housing providers, and the industry group of the Federation of Home Builders, warned that overall the government is on the right track toward… Missed target of 1.5 million By approximately one-third.
The number of new homes in England fell by 6 per cent to 221,070 in the year to March.
Litchfields calculated that the original transition rules could cost about 70,000 homes over the five years.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said the final policy published on Thursday will include some amendments aimed at speeding up the transition process.
These include requiring councils to commit to a timetable for a new local plan within three months, and forcing those with old targets in their local plans to face higher requirements in mid-2026.
However, when the current local plan is close to the government's new ambition – by a certain percentage – the council will not have to go back to the drawing board.
“They have put some provisions in place that will put pressure on local authorities to take tough action,” Lichfields' Simpson said. “In terms of the amount of overall need, I don't think it's going to make much of a difference.”
He warned that delays in drawing up plans would result in more developers referring councils to the planning appeals process, where appeals would be judged promptly in accordance with the new policy and therefore more likely to be successful.
The government's plan to rewrite the national planning framework has sparked a backlash from community groups who warn that “high” targets for new buildings will damage green spaces.
Campaigners are particularly concerned about plans to reclassify low-quality land, such as old car parks or bushland within the Green Belt, as “grey belt”. This would facilitate the construction of new schemes.
Litchfields estimates that up to 500,000 homes could be built on gray belt land over five years, requiring less than 1 per cent of the existing green belt.
The government says any new developments in the Gray Belt must meet “golden rules” including requirements to provide infrastructure such as nurseries, public surgeries, transport and affordable housing.
But Rosie Pearson, co-founder of the Community Planning Alliance, said most voters want the government to protect nature and green spaces. “This is the real test for the new Labor government, which, despite its insistence on meeting its high developer-led housing targets, must not sacrifice the environment.”
